BT 923 
• P45 
Copy 1 




BY MADISON C. PETERS 

price: paper cover, 25 cents, cloth, 50 cents 

















■a. -i i 



r 

c? 

Qln 

51ie Sljmtsanim of fRett mt& Women 
SUprranttitttj many Sarra attb Slrltgintta 
Unra pipping tn tlj? 
iHajrattr ©Ijratrr, Nntt |Jnrk 
lEumi gnutbap fHnrntnp 
QTIlta &ubatanrr nf a &m?a nf g>rrmmta ta 
Affrrtumatrly dlnarribrb bp 
tljrtr fHtntatrr, Jf|j? Autbnr 

3ht JJrrngnitinn nf tljeir Entljuaiaatir jgmppnrt nf ^ia 
Eflfnrta tn $Irrarlj the (Snapel tn tlje Wtrhurrljrii in 
a Jlrartiral anti humanitarian Wag in tl|e h«pe 
anti Witl| tlje Prager that We &ljaU AU 
Witljnut tire Cnaa nf ©ne, Wert, 
ftnnui anti iCntie £arij ©tljer 
Again in Wnrliin nn 

mh 













CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Immortality a World-Wide Belief.7 

II. Man’s Restless Spirit Proof of Immortality.14 

III. The Soul Immaterial, Therefore Immortal .... 17 

IV. The Indestructibility of Matter.21 

V. Immortality’s Influence on Conduct.23 

VI. A Future Life Necessary to Vindicate God .... 25 

VII. Our Bodily Structure Proof of Immortality.27 

VIII. A Future Life Needed to Realize Our Ideals ... 32 

IX. The Immortality of Love.36 







If a man die shall he live again ?—Job. 

We do not believe in immortality because we have 
proved it, but we forever try to prove it because we believe 
it.—M artineau. 

The grave itself is but a covered bridge leading from 
light to light through a brief darkness.— Longfellow. 

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crossed the bar.—T ennyson. 


Sm's Sratlj lEnb All? 

I. 

IMMORTALITY A WORLD-WIDE BELIEF. 

From the world’s earliest morning the thought 
of man linked life to a longer chain of time than 
that between the cradle and the grave. We find 
everywhere what Emerson calls “man’s audacious 
belief in a future life.” “In the minds of all men, 
or wherever man appears,” says the sage of Con¬ 
cord, “this belief appears with him,—in the sav¬ 
age, savagely; in the pure, purely.” John Fiske, 
in “Myths and Myth Makers,” says: “The Idea 
of Death is something impossible for the primitive 
mind to entertain.” Among the primitive people, 
like the Egyptians, the doctrine of immortality 
was not a mere hypothesis ; it was as Schlegel 
was forced to admit, “ a lively certainty, like the 
feelings of one’s own being.” And, if according 
to Carlyle, living in the hope of immortality is de¬ 
rived from the nobility of man, then must the old 
tenants of Egypt have been a noble race. 

That the future life is but a shadow of the pres¬ 
ent, is the idea that runs through Homer, who 
lived about nine hundred years before Christ. 
What noble and elevated conceptions of life in the 
spirit world Socrates gives us five hundred years 
before Christ. What an argument in Plato’s 
“ Phaedon ” to demonstrate the immortality—the 


8 


Does Death End All? 


profoundest reason ever produced. That man 
lived on somehow or other, were it only in the 
melancholy shadow of existence, was the general 
idea ever since there was a Greek people. 

Cicero, the great Roman orator, one hundred 
years before Christ, contended earnestly and elo¬ 
quently against those who denied the soul’s im¬ 
mortality. Virgil, writing fifty years before 
Christ, reflects the sentiments of the Romans in 
his iBneid, which abounds with allusions to the 
dead. 

Not only among the cultured nations do we 
find this sentiment. It has found its way into 
South Sea Islands and those of the Pacific. 
It has diffused itself over Lapland, Asia and 
Africa. Why in that forest grave, around which 
plumed and painted warriors stand unmoved and 
immovable as statues, do they bury with the body 
of the Indian chief his canoe and bow and arrow ? 
He goes to follow the chase and hunt the deer in 
the spectre-land, where the Great Spirit lives and 
the spirits of his fathers have gone before him. 
Some tribes lighted fires on the grave that the de¬ 
parted might not journey in the dark. Among the 
Seneca Indians when a maiden died they had a 
custom of imprisoning a young bird until it first 
began to try its powers of song. Then loading 
it with messages and caresses, they loosed its 
bonds over her grave, in the belief that it would 
neither fold its wings, nor close its eyes until it 


Immortality a World-Wide Belief 9 

had flown to the spirit-land and delivered its pre¬ 
cious burden of affection to the loved and lost. 

In one form or another, however distorted or 
misshapen, however steeped in savagery or sunk 
in superstition, the idea of a future life persists 
universally and outlasts all kinds of vehicles that 
seemed to contain it. Like some river of water of 
life flowing ceaselessly through the universal heart 
of humanity, it seems to say,— 

Men may come and men may go, 

But I go on forever. 

What is this intimation of immortality, this 
profoundest of all intuitions, this most ineradi¬ 
cable of all instincts, which lives ever on, renew¬ 
ing its youth, rising up from the ashes of dead 
fires, and an angel voice that sings on, above all 
the din of superstition, the degradations and mis¬ 
eries, the follies and fears of life ? What is it, if it 
is not the testimony of God speaking in the heart 
of the child, the whisper of heaven, claiming for 
its own this thing of earth ? 

Cicero long since said : “ In everything the con¬ 
sent of all nations is to be accounted the law of 
nature, and to resist it is to resist the voice of 
God.” An error never perpetuates itself. False¬ 
hood has no inherent recuperative energy. Error 
alone is sectional. Bryant says : “ Error wounded 
writhes in pain and dies amidst its worshipers.” 
Where do we go to find out what is truth, but to 
concurrent human testimony ? All men cannot 


10 


Does Death End All? 


be deceived, therefore immortality is a reality. A 
belief so universal, so entirely agreeable to our 
feelings, so accordant with our reason, so independ¬ 
ent of education, so uninfluenced by differences of 
culture, antecedents and surroundings, cannot be 
false and misleading. 

This belief is clearly not the result of education. 
It could not have originated with man, nor have 
come to him from without. It must proceed there¬ 
fore from a supreme moral intelligence. It has its 
foundation in the inward predisposition of our 
mental and moral constitution, implanted there by 
God Himself. This feeling that there is a here¬ 
after, this intuitiveness is the counterpart of re¬ 
ality. Just as the reflection of a face in the water 
is sufficient evidence that the face itself is not an 
illusion. The idea of immortality is interwoven 
with the mind, it is a part of the soul’s original fur¬ 
niture ; it is God’s appointed witness that we shall 
live again. 

Man is the only creature which has this religi¬ 
ous instinct, therefore immortality must be the end 
to which it leads. If man has an instinct looking 
forward to a future life, and there is no future life 
provided for him, then he is the solitary exception 
to a rule otherwise universal. There is no exam¬ 
ple in nature of an organic instinct without its 
correlate. Where do we see an instance of a crea¬ 
ture instinctively craving a certain kind of food in 
a place where no such food can be found ? When 


Immortality a World-Wide Belief 11 

the swallows’ instinct causes them to fly away from 
clouds and storms to seek a warmer country, do 
they not actually find a milder climate beyond the 
sea? Nature never utters false prophecies. And 
if this be true with regard to the impulses of physi¬ 
cal life, why should it not be true with regard to 
the superior instincts of the soul? Want is a 
prophecy of destiny. As Schiller puts it: “ Was 

der Geist versprecht leistet die Natur ; ” what the 
spirit promises nature performs. Addison clearly 
portrays the philosophical mind of Cato in the fol¬ 
lowing lines, as sublime in expression as in depth 
of reasoning : 

It must be so, Plato, thou reasonest well, 

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 

This longing after immortality ? 

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror, 

Of falling into naught ? Why shrinks the soul 
Back on herself and startles at destruction ? 

’Tis the divinity that stirs within us, 

’Tis heaven itself that points out a hereafter, 

And intimates eternity to man. 

Must we believe that God has raised these 
hopes to crush them ? No ! good God, no ! It is 
not conceivable of a wise and loving Father that 
when we are ready to burst out into songs of love 
and wonder, that our lips are to be forever sealed. 
Why are we endowed with this intense clinging 
to our own conscions personal life if maybe to¬ 
morrow or surely in a few years we shall be 
snuffed out like a candle? If I believed that I 


12 


Does Death End All? 


was to behold nothing but the earthly scene of the 
eternal drama, and when my spirit was wrapt in 
anxiety I must perish in suspense, I would curse 
the day that gave me birth, I would never smile 
again, I would go weeping through life. Is im¬ 
mortality a dream ? L,et me dream on. I am con¬ 
tent. 

Yes, if ’twere only a dream, 

Better it were to clasp it, 

Brood on it until it seem 
Real as the lines that grasp it. 

Why is it that when death comes it seems to 
bring with it to all men conscious assurance of 
immortality ? When men go out of life they let 
go their doubts and sweep into the satisfying 
faith of a hereafter. On his death-bed a professed 
atheist requested to be buried by the side of his 
Christian wife and daughter. When asked why, 
his response was, “If there be a resurrection of the 
righteous, they will get me up somehow or other 
and take me with them. ” This little incident re¬ 
veals the heart of man, tells the story of an im¬ 
mortal soul and voices our common hope. 

“ All men, ” says Theodore Parker, “desire to 
be immortal. ” They cling to life because they 
love it. They shrink from death, not on account 
of the pangs of dying, or of the results that follow, 
but because they dread the thought of going out 
of existence—of being dead. Whs t is this love of 
life and the fear of death but the natural expres- 


Immortality a World-Wife Belief 


13 


sion of that conviction of personal immortality 
which the inspiration of God breathed into the hu¬ 
man spirit? The sentiment of the race by its evi¬ 
dent longing for another life finds echo in the 
lines of Tennyson : 

No life that breathes with human breath 
Has ever truly longed for death. 



MAN’S RESTLESS SPIRIT—PROOF OF IMMORTALITY. 

II. 

Life is worth living. It is only mean to the 
man who makes it so. Yet, without being guilty 
of either ingratitude or pessimism, we may assert 
that it fails to satisfy the deepest cravings of the 
heart. Expectation, and not satisfaction, seems to 
be all that even the most favored ever find on 
earth. The world exhausted itself on Solomon ; he 
was a multi-billionaire; his Empire stretched from 
the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, from the foot 
of Lebanon to the desert bordering on Egypt; he 
was the encyclopaedia of his age ; he lived in a pal¬ 
ace which required fifteen-and-a-half years to com¬ 
plete ; he had forty thousand horses for chariots. 
The style of grandeur in which he lived almost 
passed credence, yet he pronounced all vanity. 

Queen Elizabeth, proud empress over a mighty 
realm, with three thousand dresses in her wardrobe, 
enough one would think to make any woman 
happy, but she was far from happy. From her 
dying couch comes the cry, “ Millions of money for 
an inch of time.” If that offer had been possible, 
how it would have revolutionized financial affairs 
for a time. Crowns may be set “ with diamonds 
or Indian stones,” but the kings and queens seldom 
enjoy the crown of content which is worn upon the 
heart. Do you imagine that the great heart of 
Abraham Lincoln ever found a moment’s happiness 


15 


Man’s Restless Spirit—Proof of Immortality 

in the White House ? Thackeray one of the ’most 
genial and lovable souls after he had won the 
applause of all intelligent lands by his wonderful 
genius, sits down in a Paris restaurant, looks at the 
other end of the room and wonders whose that for¬ 
lorn and wretched looking face before him is. Ris¬ 
ing up he finds that it is Thackeray in a mirror. 

Man’s soul is fluttering within like a caged 
bird, the noblest creature on the earth and at the 
same time the most miserable ; he has greater gifts 
and higher qualities than any other visible being, 
and yet he, and only he, is lonely and de¬ 
jected, sad and sorrowful. Man alone carries with 
him a heavy heart. How merrily sing the birds 
as they fly along over the fields and forests or cleave 
the mountain air, and how perfectly happy are 
they as they tuck their heads under their wings 
when the shadows of night fall and the wind crad¬ 
les them on some swinging bough ! The flocks 
and herds upon a thousand hills, the myriad forms 
of insect life, every winged fly and tuneful beetle, 
the fish that gaily sport and gambol in the rivers 
and seas, all cap find the end of their being ; not a 
thought of future want disturbs their perfect tran¬ 
quility. But never so with man. He alone is 
never satisfied no matter what his wealth, or fame, 
or knowledge' or, power, or earthly pleasures. 
From the the.beggar, “man never is, but 

al ways to be fel es$P ’ 



16 


Does Death End All? 


What is the explanation ? Has God made the 
beast that perishes to find his every desire grati¬ 
fied, while man is created with immortal longings 
that shall have no satisfactory response either in 
time or in eternity ? 

“ We shall be satisfied when His glory shall 
appear.” It is to this purpose God has given us 
this insatiable thirst. Man pants after happiness, 
infinite in duration ; his natural hopes and desires 
run beyond the bounds of time, his “soul uneasy 
and confined from home rests and expatiates in a 
life to come.” 


III. 

THE SOUL, IMMATERIAL, THEREFORE IMMORTAL. 

There is a close intimacy between mind and 
matter, but there is no identity between soul and 
the body. We are accustomed to say that the eye 
sees, the ear hears, and the finger feels, but they 
do not. The eyes and ears are but the instruments 
which become the media of intelligence to abso¬ 
lute mind, which uses them whenever that mind is 
inclined or obliged to employ them. So of the 
tongue and the hand, they are all adapted to per¬ 
form the will of an indwelling and controlling 
rational spirit. To explain mind it has been sug¬ 
gested that galvanism or electricity is the source 
ef the nervous influence of the human system. 
Would all the galvanism or electricity in the world 
produce the philosophy of Newton, which sought 
with all comprehending grasp to encircle*the uni¬ 
verse of God ? If mere galvanic influence is the 
source of thought, then it would follow that if you 
could impart to an animal a greater quantity of 
galvanic power you would raise him nearer to the 
dignity of man, or if you could impart to a fool a 
greater quantity of electricity, you might bring him 
to the height of a Shakespeare. The very state¬ 
ment of the thing is enough to demonstrate its 
absurdity. There must be some agent prior to and 
extraneous to the brain, which acts upon the brain, 
and thereby upon the physical system of man. 


18 


Does Death End All? 


Physiologists tell us that our bodies undergo 
complete changes. Say every seven years every 
particle of man’s physical structure is changed, or 
transferred or removed, then the man of forty- 
nine has actually had seven bodies. Then if the 
mind is material, if it is of the body, it must have 
undergone a corresponding change, and therefore 
in every seven years a man’s consciousness that 
he is must have changed, there would not be any 
recollection of his past life nor knowledge of per¬ 
sonal identity, nor assurance that at forty-nine 
years of age he is the same person that he was at 
twenty-one or thirty-five. You know that you 
have undergone changes, yet you have the consci¬ 
ousness of personal identity. What is that some¬ 
thing that has remained intact, that has not been 
affected by the perpetual pulling down of the old 
material and a perpetual replacement by new ? In 
this human microcosm every time the watch ticks, 
there are millions of molecules of the old body dis¬ 
solved and carried away and their places supplied 
by as many millions of new. Yet you know that 
notwithstanding this process of destruction going 
on in every portion of your frame, that throughout 
the years you have maintained your personal iden¬ 
tity, which forces you to admit the presence of 
something besides matter, something that is free 
from the perpetual changes to which matter is 
subject—that matter flows on, while the spiritual 
substance called soul, endures distinct fr s «*m, and 


The Soul Immaterial, Therefore Immortal 19 

independent of matter. The soul is endowed with 
immortality as a part of its very nature. It is an 
immaterial substance, inaccessible to all violence 
from matter, and therefore cannot perish through 
its instrumentality. As Addison sings : 

The soul secure in her existence, smiles 
At the drawn dagger and defies its point. 

The stars may fade away, the sun himself 
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, 

But she shall flourish in immortal youth, 

Unhurt amid, the war of elements, 

The wreck of matter and the erash of worlds. 

The mind never sleeps. Who is not conscious 
that his mind is frequently in a state of more ac¬ 
tive and vigorous exercise during sleep than in the 
waking hours ? The famous astronomer, Sir John 
Herschell, declared that the following stanza was 
composed by him while sleeping and dreaming, 
November 28, I 84 I, and written down immediately 
on waking : 

Throw thyself on thy God, nor mock him with feeble denial. 

Sure of His love and oh ! sure of His mercy at last ; 

Bitter and deep though its draught, yet shun not the cup of 
thy trial, 

But in its healing effect, smile at its bitterness past. 

Upon the hypothesis that the mind and the 
body are alike material, how are these things to 
be accounted for ? Our very dreams by night in¬ 
struct us that we have within these changing 
bodies of ours, a living, active principle, a spirit 
which disdains obedience to physical laws—to rest 


20 


Does Death End All ? 


when it rests, and die when it dies and must there¬ 
fore live on when the body shall crumble back to 
dust. 

If the mind grows and dies with the body, 
why is it that children have thoughts and fears 
and feelings which they are not able to express by 
the bodily organs ? Children grow up with men¬ 
tal impressions that we cannot account for—the 
listening look, the liveted attention show that the 
mind in the child is greater than the body. 

We find also that mind is not always wasted by 
disease. Take the case of George Dana Boardman, 
for many years minister of the First Baptist Church 
in Philadelphia. Paralysis had unnerved and un¬ 
strung the whole body—in the most distressed 
condition imaginable, yet his intellectual powers 
remained to his last moments unscathed. The 
subtlety, the wisdom, the skill, the talent and 
the penetration of his mind remained as vigorous 
as in the meridian of his life—while he held death 
at bay he finished his “Ethics of the Body,” the 
crowning victory of his splendid genius. 

There must be something within man that con¬ 
stitutes real self and which enables him to feel that 
in spite of all his physical calamities there is that 
in him which is superior to decay and when the 
physical proportions of his being have dissolved 
into the primitive elements of dust, his soul un¬ 
affected “ stands immortal amid ruin ” like the soul 
of Ianthe described by Shelley. 


IV 

THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF MATTER. 

According to the positive teaching of the most 
advanced science of the day nothing in the whole 
realm of nature is really destroyed in the sense of 
being annihilated. We have no power over matter 
to destroy it. We can change its form only. The 
mere mote floating in the sunbeam is imperishable. 
What we call “death” does not involve extinction, 
only change. When we speak of anything as de¬ 
stroyed what we really mean is that it has altered 
its condition. When we affirm that it no longer is ) 
we affirm only that it no longer is what it was. It 
has become something else. You may freeze a 
drop of water, or heat it to steam, decompose it in¬ 
to its elementary gases, or explode it; it still exists 
evejy atom of it; or dispense or change its elements 
as we may, they will forever defy all efforts at 
their annihilation. Annihilation is a name for 
what never yet occured to matter and never can. 
It is an established law of nature that nothing that 
is once launched into being shall ever go out of 
e xistence. 

We are told that the race is perpetual, but the 
individuals are perishable. To the animal the pres¬ 
ent is everything while the future is the great 
fountain of man’s happiness. If the present is all 
to the animal, wdien extinguished it loses nothing. 


22 


Does Death End All ? 


But if man be annihilated he loses all the past 
treasures he has accumulated and foregoes all he 
anticipated for the future, a catastrophe too big for 
human imagination to conceive, too horrid for the 
mind to dwell upon. 

The destruction of the apple-tree is merely a 
change of form and development, a transmigration 
of substance, but man’s soul thus reduced can¬ 
not become thus revived. My consciousness can 
never be another man’s. The destruction of the 
tree is only its preparation for another existence, 
perhaps more beautiful than its former one; the 
destruction of my soul must, by necessity of the 
case, be utter annihilation. It can never be trans¬ 
migration or be transferred to any other. The 
consciousness of personal identity which constitutes 
me is inalienable from me ; it must be extinguished 
altogether or perpetuated in myself. 

The endless expansion and growth of the tree 
would be mischievous; there would be no space or 
room for other trees just as useful, but the reverse 
is true of man’s soul. The more he masters the 
more he expands the powers of those around him. 


V. 


immortality’s influence on conduct. 

Renan says oue evidence for the truth of im¬ 
mortality may be found in the nobility of behavior 
it inspires. The idea that man is but— 

The pilgrim of a day, 

Spouse of the worm and brother of the clay, 

Frail as the leaf in autumn’s yellow bower, 

Dust in the wind or dew upon the flower, 

A child without a sire, 

Whose mortal life and transitory fire, 

Light to the grave his chance created form, 

As ocean wrecks illuminate the storm. 

And then 

To-night and silence sink forever more ! 
does not kindle great deeds and strengthen for any 
sublime endeavor. Cicero said of the Epicurean 
creed that it was utterly to be rejected because it 
led to nothing worthy or generous. If death ends 
all, what an imposture our system of laws on which 
society is founded. If we must wholly perish, the 
maxims of charity and justice and the precepts of 
honor and friendship are empty words. Why 
should they be binding if in this life only we have 
hope ? What duty do we owe to the dead, to the 
living or to ourselves, if all will be nothing? If 
retribution terminates with the grave, morality is 
a bugbear of human invention. What are the 
sweet ties of kindred if we shall not live again ? 
What sanctity is there to the last wish of the dying 


24 


Does Death End All? 


if death is a wall instead of a door ? What is 
obedience to laws but an insane servitude, justice 
an unwarrantable infringement upon liberty, the 
laws of marriage a vain scruple, and government 
an imposition upon credulity, if death ends all ? 

There was one nation and only one that ever 
tried to destroy belief in God in immortality. 
France decreed in national convention that there 
was no God and death an eternal sleep. The Sab¬ 
bath was abolished, churches were turned into tem¬ 
ples of reason, the Bible was dragged along the 
streets by way of derision and contempt. Infideli¬ 
ty then reigned and frightful was its reign. Its 
crown was terror, its throne the guillotine, its 
sceptre the battle-axe, its palace >ard a field of 
blood, and its royal robes dripped with human 
gore. Gutters were filled with the torn shreds of 
human flesh. Property was confiscated. The 
morning breeze and evening wind bore across the 
vine-clad hills of France the cries of suffering and 
the shrieks of terror, and to save the metropolis 
and the kingdom from utter desolation, the infidel 
authorities had to institute the Sabbath and public 
worship. Were the belief in God and immortality 
to die out in the human heart, the flood-gates of 
vice would open wide, plunge the world into the 
grave of despair, and consign humanity to the dun¬ 
geons of the damned. 


VI 

THE FUTURE UIFE A NECESSITY TO VINDICATE 
GOD’S CHARACTER 

All the arguments that go to prove the exis¬ 
tence of God—a God endowed with such attributes 
as are.essential to our very conception of His char¬ 
acter, point out the moral necessity of a future 
state of existence beyond the grave, in which the 
imperfections and inequalities of the present moral 
government will not only be redressed, but the 
whole will be shown to be holy and righteous. 

There is sin and there is punishment for sin, 
which we daily witness. But there is not for all 
sin such a reckoning in this world as meets the 
claims of righteousness and justice. Do we not 
see evil doings go undetected and many bad men 
pass unpunished ? See how often the righteous 
suffer and the wicked flourish. When we take a 
deliberate view we are naturally led to exclaim • 
“Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, 
are mighty in power ? Is there no reward for the 
righteous ? Is there no punishment for the 'work¬ 
ers of iniquity? Is there no God that judgeth in 
the earth ?” 

And indeed, were there no retribution beyond 
the limits of this present life, we should be neces¬ 
sarily obliged to admit one or the other of the 
following conclusions: Either that no Moral 
Governor of the world exists or that justice and 
judgment are not the habitations of His throne. 


26 


Does Death End All? 


If the moral government, the existence of 
which our experience avouches, is ever to have its 
administrations perfected and wrought to a com¬ 
plete actualizing of its own manifest principles, it 
can only be in another state of existence, and the 
double conclusion presses upon us, that there is a 
future life, and that that life is one of rewards and 
punishments. 

Earthly providence is a travesty of justice on 
any other theory that it is a preliminary stage 
which is to be followed by rectification. God 
must in justice to Himself, before the assembled 
universe, send the evil-doer to desolation and 
crown suffering goodness, to show that He was 
always on the side of right. Sin is often in honor 
here, and goodness in dishonor, and that God may 
demonstrate that He is both just and good, man 
must stand again after death. The crown must be 
put upon righteousness and injustice driven to its 
own place, that justice may again grow bright and 
the universe rejoice in its Righteous Ruler. 


VII. 

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL INFERRED FROM 
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BODY IN 
WHICH IT DWELLS. 

The body in which the soul lives is the climax 
of all beauty, completeness and adaptation which is 
aimed at and apprehended by slow degrees through 
the lower grades of the animal creation. God has 
not given us the strength of the horse or the ele¬ 
phant, but He has endowed us with intelligence so 
as to apply our strength for ourselves and surpass 
the power of all other creatures. God has not 
given us the swiftness of the eagle, the hearing of 
the elk, the sight of the panther or the keen scent 
of the fox hound, nor has He clothed us with the 
delicate and dazzling plumage of the Bird of Para¬ 
dise, but He has given us command of forces that 
can transport us where the birds of the air can 
never fly ; He has given to the human face the 
beauty of expression and to the human form a grace 
of movement more impressive than brilliant robes ; 
God has not endowed us with a tenacity of life 
which belongs to some of the animal creation, but 
He has enabled us to live and enjoy life in all sea¬ 
sons and climates the world around. Man is the 
only animal that by his own exertions and capaci¬ 
ties has become a cosmopolite. It is strange that 
man should have such a universal diffusion, the 


28 


Does Death End All? 


parts of the world uninhabited by him, making up 
less than one-tenth of the fifty-two millions of 
square miles of the earth’s surface, while those ani¬ 
mals which are, zoologically, most nearly allied 
to man in structure, have exceedingly narrow 
areas of distribution. For instance, the gorilla is 
confined to a small tract of West Africa, the chim¬ 
panzee to a still more restricted portion of the same 
continent, that between the sea coast on the West 
and the meridian of Lake Tanganyika on the Bast, 
while the ourang-outang is limited to the islands 
of Sumatra and Borneo. 

Man is the greatest of all God’s great works ; 
the superfices and outlines of his organization show 
him to be infinitely superior to all those visible 
beings by which he is surrounded. 

The number of bones in the human body is 
variously estimated, say, two hundred and forty, 
(the bones vary in different periods of life, several, 
separated in youth, being united in old age) ; these 
bones have forty distinct indentions, four hundred 
and forty-six muscles within, so that the bones and 
muscles have upwards of fourteen thousand inden¬ 
tions. There are not less than ten thousand nerves, 
with an equal number of veins and arteries, one 
thousand ligaments, four thousand lacteals and 
lymphatics, one hundred thousand glands, and the 
skin contains not less than two hundred millions 
of pores, all of which are so many avenues of 
health or sickness, life or death. 


Immortality of th« Soul 


29 


No mechanism ever invented by man was ever 
so well contrived as the eye which is both a camera 
obscura and a telescope, takes the direction of every 
desire and accomodates itself to every range of dis¬ 
tance in all degrees of light. The ear a complete 
acoustic instrument, with its exterior trumpet col¬ 
lecting sounds, its vibrating tympanum, its cham¬ 
ber and widening passages acting as chords to 
brace the drum just as required, while the whole is 
built-up within a stone-like structure which pre¬ 
vents the sound from being wasted. The hand in 
itself is sufficient to suggest the nobleness of the 
creature to whom such an organ has been given. 
With it, from instruments, can be evoked sweetest 
music to express almost every conceivable feeling 
and emotion, it can tunnel the mountains, cut down 
the forests, apply the fuse to the cannon creating 
a thunder which shakes both earth and sky, and 
yet it can give a touch so delicate as to move a mi¬ 
croscopic mote from the eye. The heart , about ten 
ounces in weight, contracts about four thousand 
times every hour and through it during that period, 
passes two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of blood, while 
within the compass of a day it makes more than 
one hundred thousand pulsations and in a year 
more than thirty-six millions ; it performes more 
than one-fifth of the mechanical work of the body, 
exerting a force that would lift its own weight 13,- 
000 feet every hour. The stoppage of the heart 
and the cessation of life are simultaneous, the mo- 


30 


Does Death End All? 


ment it stops we are in eternity. The tongue i s 
the most complex in structure, not excepting even 
the eye, most delicate in sensibility, most marvel¬ 
ous in power, most varied in adaptation, the most 
complete embodiment and revelation of the in 
dwelling mind. 

Of all the countless animal organisms with 
which God has peopled the globe, and with all 
their wonderful variety, beauty, exquisite work¬ 
manship, adaptation to various abodes, the body of 
man alone is adapted to the occupancy and demand 
of an intelligent spirit. Suppose the spirit of Bry¬ 
ant had been lodged in the physical organization 
of an elephant, the most intelligent of all animals, 
could he have held a pen with his clumsy toes or 
dictated “ Thanatopsis ” to an amanuensis through 
the throat of such an animal ? What animal but 
man could play the piano, even if endowed with 
the musical genius of a Paderewski ? Not a body 
among all the birds, beasts and fishes is adapted to 
the demands of an intellectual life. The human 
body is the abode of a rational and immortal na¬ 
ture, and from the character of the house itself, we 
logically infer the destiny of the soul, a destiny 
unlike that of the beast that perishes. 

Perhaps even more fearful and wonderful than 
reason is that strange characteristic of man, that 
still, soft voice that speaks so clearly within our 
'utmost being, instructing us as to the moral worth 
of conduct and which constitutes what we com- 


Immortality of the Soul 


31 


monly refer to as conscience. God has a throne in 
every man’s heart and wherever he goes he carries 
with him the inward sense of His presence. How 
fearful is thaPexperience of the soul called remorse! 
Guilty man needs no other accuser than his own 
conscience. Shakespeare emphasizes the word of 
God—“ Fear shall terrify him on every side and 
shall entangle his feet ”—when he says, 

“O ! coward conscience how thou dost afflict me ! 

The light burns blue ; is it not dead midnight ? 

Cold, fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. 

And yet to balance this fearful exposure to self 
condemnation is the equally wonderful susceptibil¬ 
ity of the soul to be satisfied in doing right. What 
sweet content a clear conscience brings: 

“His strength was as the strength of ten 
Because his heart was pure.” 

After Cardinal Wolsey’s fall, Cromwell asks, 
“ How does Your Grace ? ” Wolsey, sustained by 
the sense of personal innocence, answers : 

“Why well: 

Never so truly happy, my good Cromwell! 

I know myself now, and I feel within me 
A peace above all earthly dignities— 

A still and quiet conscience.” 

The voice of conscience is the voice of God, 
declaring His abhorrence of wicked deeds, and that 
His Providence presides over the actions of moral 
agents, and so gives intimation of the future woe 
to those who obstinately persist in their trespasses 
and impenitence, and opens before the heart, right 
with God, the blessedness of an everlasting glory. 


VIII. 

man’s unrealized ideals. 

A future life is needed for the working out of 
that moral completeness which the present never 
brings. We are cut off when we begin to be ready 
to do something in the world. Beecher said : “ We 
are like plants in an unhospitable climate, which 
bear leaves and blossoms, but no fruit.” Nature 
cannot do her work in vain. There must be some 
clime where we can bear our fruit. Victor Hugo 
expresses the hope that death is not life’s close, 
but rather its beginning :—“ I feel in myself the 
future life; I am like a forest that has been more 
than once cut down ; the new shoots are stronger 
and livelier than ever; I am rising I know towards 
the sky ; the sunshine is upon my head; the earth 
gives me its generous sap, but heaven lights me 
with reflections of unknown worlds. You say the 
soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers, 
why, then, is my soul the more luminous when my 
bodily powers begin to fail ? Winter is upon my 
head and eternal Spring is in my heart; I breathe 
at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets 
and the roses as at twenty years ; the nearer I ap¬ 
proach the end, the plainer I hear around me the 
immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite 
me; it is marvelous, yet simple. For half a century 
I have been writing my thought in prose, verse, 
history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, 


Man’s Unrealized Ideals 


33 


satire, ode, song, I have tried all, but I feel that I 
have not said the thousandth part of what is in me. 
When I go down to the grave I can say, like so 
many others, ‘ I have finished my day’s work ; ’ I 
cannot say, 1 1 have finished my life ! My day’s 
work will begin again the next morning. The 
tomb is not a blind alley—it is a thoroughfare ; it 
closes in the twilight to open with the dawn. My 
work is only beginning; my monument is hardly 
above its foundation; I would be glad to see it 
mounting and mounting forever; the thirst for 
the infinite proves infinity.” 

Goethe says his belief in the immortality of the 
soul springs from the idea of activity,—“ for I have 
the most assured conviction that our soul is of an 
essence absolute, indestructible, an essence that 
works on from eternity to eternity. It is like the 
sun, which, to our earthly eye, sinks and sets, but 
in reality never sinks but shines on unceasingly.” 
Bishop Randolph S. Foster argues : “ The philos¬ 
ophy of the mind shows that it was made, not for 
a day, but for eternity. The improvidence of God 
in stopping it would be like the improvidence of 
an artist who should go into the studio and com¬ 
mence making a beautiful specimen of art, clothing 
it with utmost richness and utmost perfection of 
beauty, and then, just when he had fairly got it set 
up, sufficiently advanced to show what it was to 
be, should burn it up and repeat that day after 
day. Suppose a man should work hard to make a 


34 


Does Death End All? 


fortune and as soon as lie made it, should put it 
into the fire and burn it up, would you not say he 
was insane ? Suppose you found a maker of any¬ 
thing, who just when his creation began to be 
worthy, should dash it to pieces, what would you 
think of his wisdom ? If it were a work that had 
infinite possibilities of good in it and he should 
pulverize it just when realization of possible good 
was reached, what would you think then? Would 
not all intelligence pronounce it a reckless, nay, an 
insane whim ? The argument from the nature of 
the soul is precisely this.” 

Browning says : 

I know this earth is not my sphere, 

For I cannot so narrow me, but that 
I shall exceed it. 

This high ideal which is not reached on earth 
intimates an immortal life, which may afford time 
and scope for its realization. Lowell nobly says 
in his elegy on the death of Canning : 

Thou art not dead : in thy higher sphere 
Thy spirit bends itself to loving tasks, 

And strength to perfect what is dreamed of here 
Is all the crown and glory that it asks. 

Theodore Parker on his death-bed said to a 
friend, “ I am not afraid to die, but I might wish 
to carry on my work. I have only half used the 
powers God gave me.” Emmanuel Kant argued 
from the existence of a moral law unrealized and 
unrealizable here, the necessity of some after-life. 
Perfection is the heritage with which God has 


Man’s Unrealized Ideals 


35 


endowed me, and since this short life does not give 
completeness, I must have the immortal life in 
which to find it. This yearning after perfection 
and completeness is the soul’s qualification for and 
prophecy of its own immortality. I know no view¬ 
point from which the grandeur of life is more im¬ 
pressive. The high aspirations of the soul are no 
longer blasting mockeries. The problem of life 
is solved. It is the precursor of a possible perfec¬ 
tion which to be realized will lay all eternity under 
tribute. 

The vast strides man has made during the 
short compass of his present earth-life in his march 
towards civilization, is a prophecy of the infinite 
possibilities before him in the future, and death is 
only a stage in man’s evolution upward, only 
another name for birth, introducing him into an¬ 
other grander sphere of the eternal process moving 
on. 

Your past life has been down hill and towards 
gloom : your future is uphill towards the glorious 
sun-rise. 

Dying is throwing open the door that the bird 
may fly out of his netted cage and be heard singing 
in higher flights and in diviner realms. 


THE IMMORTALITY OF LOVE. 

The love that lightens life acts instinctively on 
the hypothesis of eternity. In the untimely death 
of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson lost his dear¬ 
est friend ; in his “ In Memoriam ” the poet’s love 
seeks an immortal support; in the persistence of 
love and longing to meet the loved again, the poet 
argues that death is only a temporary loss :— 

But in my spirit will I dwell, 

And dream my dreams and hold it true, 

For though my lips may breathe adieu, 

I cannot think the thing, farewell. 

At the foot of the white marble cross which 
his wife placed upon the grave of Charles Kingsley, 
are graven these words : “ We have loved, we love, 
we shall love. ” 

In the beautiful drama of Ion the instinct of 
immortality so eloquently uttered by the death of 
the devoted Greek finds a deep response in every 
soul. When about to yield his young existence a 
sacrifice to his fate, his beloved Clemanthe asks, if 
they shall meet again, to which he replies: “ I 

asked that dreadful question of the hills that 
seemed eternal, of the clear streams that flow for¬ 
ever, of the stars among whose fields of azure, my 
Spirit has walked. As I look upon thy loving face 
I feel that there is something in thy love that can¬ 
not wholly perish. We shall meet again Clem¬ 
anthe . ” 


The Immortaltiy of Love 


37 


Love is forever. The marriage contract, “ un¬ 
til death do us part ” really does not mean a con¬ 
tract for this life only. Love’s language is forever 
and she speaks no other tongue. 

In one of George MacDonald’s romances, there 
is a young girl, carefully nurtured, but who had 
never been touched religiously, who was engaged 
to marry a man who was a professed unbeliever. 
But it comes 'to pass, that this girl is awakened 
spiritually, that she comes to know herself as a 
being crowned with the sapphire glow of immor¬ 
tality, and she questions George: “Tell me how 
long you will love me ? ” And after a little dis¬ 
cussion of that sort, she lets the young man go^ 
because says she, “ It may be only a whim, but it 
is my whim to be loved as an immortal woman. ” 

None of us want to be loved any other way, 
and if it were that we should not meet and know 
one another in heaven, then when our dead are 
laid away in the grave, our love for them ought to 
die. But we do not cease to love the dead, neither 
do we love them less, but rather more than we 
love the living, with a love more unselfish and 
with less taint of earthliness about it, and if we, 
with all our restrictions upon us, can love so ar¬ 
dently, how much more can those, who with ever- 
broadening faculties having entered into the ful¬ 
ness of life, love with deeper passionateness. 

The yearning for the eternal life of those we 
love involves the certainty that the great heart of 


38 


Does Death End All? 


God will out-soar, in the eternal order which He 
has established, our highest desires. When our 
friends have crossed the river, we are somehow 
bound to them by the chords of a deathless love. 
We can somehow never realize that they are gone, 
the looks, the forms, the voices, the smiles of the 
dead are still with us. We feel their mysterious 
nearness. Love still teaches us to love them. In 
every tear that we shed, in every sigh that we 
heave, we have so many proofs in the soul itself, 
that the dead, whose memory we so fondly cherish, 
still live immortal beyond the grave. 

We are richer for having loved although we 
lost. As Tennyson puts it: 

This truth came born with bier and pall, 

I felt it when I sorrowed most; 

‘ Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all. 

Whittier hopefully cries :— 

Yet love will dream and faith will trust, 

Since He who knows our need is just, 

That somewhere, somehow meet we must. 

Alas for him who never sees 

The stars shine through his cypress trees: 

Who hopeless lays his dead away, 

Nor looks to see the breaking day 
Across the mournful marbles lay, 

Who hath not learned in hours of faith 
The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 

That life is ever lord of death, 

And love can never lose its own. 

Holy affections as well as glorious bodies shall 
come forth from the tomb, suspended ties of love, 


The Immortality of Love 


39 


which like plants whose life retired during winter 
into the bosom of the earth will revive in. vernal 
loveliness and blossom in an eternal spring. This 
is the immortality which Christ brought to light 
through the Gospel, this agreeable hope that we 
shall surely rise again in new beauty when the 
eternal morning shall dawn upon the grave, this 
pleasurable anticipation which rises like a May 
sun over the world of social life, cheering, warm¬ 
ing and making it beautiful, subdues the keenness 
of grief and brightens up the short interval of 
sorrow between the death of our loved ones and 
our own, and casts back the light of comfort from 
the distant heavens upon the bleak shores of this 
mortal life. 

A man returning from a whaling voyage en¬ 
tered port at New Bedford ; he had been three 
years on the cruise and had left his wife and little 
boy behind. The whaler had been reported as 
nearing land and the wife and little boy had gone 
down on the point that juts out a mile or more 
into the bay to keep a watch for the loved one. 
They had brought with them a sea-glass so that 
they might catch a glimpse of the familiar form at 
the earliest moment possible. Yonder, just off 
Cuttyhunk the boat comes into sight with all can¬ 
vas spread spanking along beneath a stiff breeze. 
See the woman now as she levels her glass,—the 
throbbing breast, the flashing eye, the intense 
eagerness in every attitude and gesture, the flush 


40 


Does Death End All? 


of face, the cry of laughter, the tears of joy. She 
waves her handkerchief as a welcome on the 
breeze, while the boy dances for gladness, swing¬ 
ing and shouting over the water; they see the hus¬ 
band and father, and he sees them and waves his 
tarpaulin as a sign of recognition. Ah! who can 
tell the joy of these loving hearts when husband 
clasps wife in his strong arms and the boy weeps 
for gladness on his neck. 

When we reach the land unswept by storm, 
when we enter the city and temple of our God } 
fresh from the clasp of death and our victory over 
it, we shall not feel alone in that multitude. The 
loved of long ago w ill gather about us and give us 
welcome. We shall be met at the landing. Those 
who loved us will greet us, speak our name and 
embrace us and Jesus will confess us before the 
angels. Those we have loved and who have gone 
before, we will find waiting for us at the portals 
and a band of beautiful immortals will surround 
us on that radiant shore, and with a holy rapture 
to which the redeemed can give utterance, lead us 
to the exalted Saviour and with us bow at H:s 
feet and receive the conqueror’s crown from Him. 




0 034 076 509 6 











